


God's a Flogging Captain, Just As I Have Been

by lieutenant_isaac



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Discussion of suicidality and ongoing decision to live, Gen, Huddled in a tent talking about religion, M/M, Mutiny, Touches only briefly on romance or sexuality I am sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 20:54:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29863908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lieutenant_isaac/pseuds/lieutenant_isaac
Summary: “I am ashamed, James. I’m ashamed of all of it.”“If we are come to the end of vanity,” said James, taking his hand, “is it also possible that we are come to the end of blame?”Francis shook his head in the dark. “No.”James’ face, indistinct in the moonlight, knitted tighter. “Francis, you asked not to be alone.”“I did.”“Did you ask it because you want to live?”After the mutiny, James and Francis talk through the dark.
Relationships: Francis Crozier/James Fitzjames
Comments: 16
Kudos: 46





	God's a Flogging Captain, Just As I Have Been

After they had walked through the camp and ascertained that the dead were dead, the men gathered in the place where they’d taken their mess. Before today’s mutiny, the ones with a touch more energy than the rest had attempted to call it “Trafalgar Square.” Now it was nameless once again.

In the heavy wet haze, they were a circle of dead faces, each one an X within an O. They had picked up the fallen benches and huddled together by instinct, and no one seemed to be asking Francis to speak, but he was desperate to say something. Something, anything, to draw the loving knot about them once more.

“We should drag the dead out of camp,” he said to James, who had appeared out of the murk at his left shoulder. “We should light a fire to draw any survivors who may be lost. We should...”

“Francis,” said James, “I will fall, if I stand much longer.”

He shook his head. “Thank you.”

“Why?”

“For being my barometer of the possible. Men!”

The dispirited figures looked up at him.

“I am ordering you to rest,” he said. “No more can be done tonight.” 

“Sir,” said Little, “we ought to set a watch.”

“For what, Edward? For Mr. Hickey’s party or for the creature?”

“I don’t think we’ll be seeing Mr. Hickey again,” said Little. “But the creature?”

Francis took a long scent of the night air. “Have you the strength to stand watch, Edward? Or rather, have any of us?”

Little was silent.

“No. Even the creature cannot eat forever. For tonight, we must trust that he has supped full with horrors. Like Macbeth, and we. Hm?”

The men filed away, some of them pausing to give Francis or James a little nod, a touch on the shoulder, an assurance. When they were gone, he turned to James and said quietly, “I would count it a personal favor if you did not allow me to be alone tonight.”

James nodded mutely. He allowed Francis to lead him to his tent, which was not only standing, but immaculate: the camp-bed, folding table, the razor and comb, the furs piled on the floor, all of the things that had seemed necessary before today. Francis carefully placed his gun on the table and then put his face in his hands, looking for a choked scream, a suppressed sob, that refused to come. Beside him, James fell to his knees; Francis reached for his hand too late, and in any event James pushed it away.

“The floor will do for me, Francis.”

“Take the bed, James.”

“I just want to sleep.”

He knelt to take James in his arms and to pull him up to the bed. James didn’t resist, but he lay limp; for all the flesh that had dropped away from him, the man’s polished bones were still so heavy that Francis could barely move him. The moment he touched the bed, he passed out, and Francis’ arms collapsed under his dead weight. When he stood, he saw that James’ boots were still hanging off the end of the cot. He gave up and half-fell to the furs, made out the sky through the tent lacing, and then was unconscious.

It should have been the crush of responsibility, of shame, of sheer horror, that woke him – but in fact, of course, it was his belly. He had had nothing to eat since the previous morning, and that had been close enough to nothing. He pulled his leaden limbs up from the fur and found James awake, feverish, his skin damp. Francis unlaced the tent and went outside.

It was still full night, and the camp was silent but for the metallic noise of his boots on the stones. The mutineers had ransacked and collapsed the tent where food was stored, but he picked up a dented tin of ship’s biscuits from where it had fallen. Then the apparition of John Bridgens appeared from the other side of the tent. He had a furtive air, and was carrying his own tin of biscuits, and for a moment his look at Francis was like a trapped poacher’s.

“At ease, Bridgens. We’re all hungry.”

“I only came to fetch some food for Mr. Peglar. He’s poorly just now.”

“I know you would take nothing you don’t need.” He turned over the little tin in his hands, and a bubble of anger rose in him at the injustice of the world, the bitterness and gall of having to struggle for garbage while, on other continents, other men thrived. The emotion was something from another time, and he laid a hand upon his breast for a moment, as if to protect it before it departed again, a little body like a dove.

“They’ve let the water out of some of the tanks,” said Bridgens, “but not all. I can fill your canteen.”

“I can fill it myself. You must see to Mr. Peglar.” 

He brought back the biscuits and water to the tent, then sat down on the ground with his back to the bed and ate a piece of biscuit and drank some water. When he felt James’ sweating hand groping at his shoulder, he passed the canteen up to him and felt James force himself up to sit. 

“I damned near broke a tooth on that biscuit,” said Francis in a muddy whisper. “If you’re hungry, I can mush one up.”

“To think I am subsisting on mush,” said James, but he sat patiently as Francis crumbled a biscuit into a plate, drowned it in water, plucked a spoon from the table for him, watched him begin to eat.

“How is it?”

“Really rather good,” said James indistinctly, around the spoon.

After he finished the plate, he eased himself from the bed to the floor and said, “I’m too long for this wretched cot, Francis. Take it back.”

He laid a hand on James’ forehead – cooler, drier. “Did you sleep, James?”

“Such as I do, now. Did you?”

“Yes.”

“You sound ashamed of it.”

“I am ashamed, James. I’m ashamed of all of it.”

“If we are come to the end of vanity,” said James, taking his hand, “is it also possible that we are come to the end of blame?”

Francis shook his head in the dark. “No.”

James’ face, indistinct in the moonlight, knitted tighter. “Francis, you asked not to be alone.”

“I did.”

“Did you ask it because you want to live?”

There was no doubt, no judgement in the question. It was a request for a fact. They sat huddled on the ground, close together.

“What I want has nothing to do with it,” said Francis. “Look at us. Our chances of survival are nil now, James. There’s nothing.”

“But do you want to live?”

“Yes, James, yes.” He swallowed, and the sound in the blurry tent was very loud. 

“You’re lying.”

“Yes. But, James, I’ll not die if I can help it. I’ll not waste the gift I’m given.” 

“By whom?”

“By God,” said Francis, taken aback. “Of course.”

“You don’t believe in God,” said James. There was no strength in him to be angry, to be vituperative, but Francis could still feel a kind of diffuse anger radiating from his feverish body. “You see, you’re lying again.”

“James, I have wanted to die since I was a tiny child,” said Francis softly. “Since I was a little boy. The world seemed so dreadful to me, so lonely. That I had been put into it seemed a mistake, and I wanted to speak to God – in whom I _do_ believe, if only to hold Him to account – to tell Him that He was a feckless captain for placing me in this position. I felt life as a constant humiliation and pain, to the point where its real pains and humiliations could barely mark me. I would have called God out if I could.”

“Then what has saved you all this time, even allowed you to thrive?”

“Am I thriving now, James?”

“You thrive the most of anyone I know,” said James, his voice urgent, frustrated. “Look at you. You told me that you can’t tell whether the scurvy is in you. You know it’s not.”

“That’s not because of my mental _fortitude_ , James. It is luck.”

“Your love is not a matter of luck. You take care of the men. You take care of me.”

“I take care of no one,” said Francis. The words rose like bile in his chest; he thought of how drowned men rise as they rot. “You, perhaps, but not the men. Not Dr. Goodsir, certainly not Sergeant Tozer or Mr. Des Voeux –”

“They are Hickey’s now, and not your responsibility any longer. I wish them joy of him.”

“Not Harry Goodsir, James, never him. And the others –“ Francis shook his head, and the motion turned into something else, a rhythmic slow rocking of the body. “I threw them into the arms of Cornelius Hickey. I drove them there with a whip of my own. And now he will tear through them like a wind.”

“He is an evil man, Francis. Don’t you dare blame yourself for what he is.”

“No! No –”

“Listen to what you are saying – if any man is evil –”

Francis gripped James’ wrist with a dry hand. “He is not, because none of us are. It’s for Satan to be evil, and besides, Satan’s made up. No, James, it’s much worse than that. He is indifferent. He does not mean ill to others at all – neither ill nor well – and that is why he wounds and kills them. He might just as well love them, except that in his indifference, he knows that love will gain him nothing.” He stared at the moving wall of the tent. “Love won’t get him ahead the way that killing does.”

“You sound as if you are talking of the creature.”

“The creature,” said Francis softly. “No, the creature is nobler than Hickey by far.”

He took a long breath. The eddies of wind and darkness in the tent were soothing, and so was James’ breathing presence; without them, what would he have done tonight? The gun on the table. Or, no. He would have found a way to go on, without the gun on the table, or the razor resting on the edge of the basin. But a part of him would have died that had lived tonight. 

Aloud he said, “God’s a flogging captain, just as I have been.”

“You never answered my question,” said James. “Is talking about the traitor Cornelius Hickey really easier than talking about how you bring yourself to get up each day?”

Francis sighed again. “He was telling the truth about my resignation.”

“I know he was. To what are you resigned?”

He could not imagine being asked anything more private than this. He settled a little closer to James, feeling like a mother bird in a nest of fur, James his warm egg. “I am resigned to living. And I live by binding myself among people.”

“By a sense of obligation to others?”

“Not obligation.” He felt a muscle in his lip twitch. “Obligation – sense of duty – those are for you, dear James, not me. You have seen me at my worst. You know with what _enthusiasm_ I have asked the Lord to let this cup pass from me.”

“And yet you did, in fact, let it pass from you.”

“Don’t you dare,” said Francis.

“Dare what? I’ll dare what I like. That is for me, too.” 

“Dare to turn my metaphor about. I’m too tired.”

“Answer the bloody question. I’m dying.”

“Well, then. If you must know, I suppose I live for two reasons. One is for – ah – a kind of revenge.” He nodded again in the dark. “If I am to be thrust here in this hostile place, I demand my due in return. I want to walk the world, and see all the – massive beauty of it. And the other –” He hesitated, stuck. Even to say _binding myself among people_ had been a new thought, a new articulation of something that had always been instinctive to him. Finally, he opened his mouth again, and the words came to him, as they did in emergencies and in front of his men: “I creep in among people like a cuckoo in a nest. I make myself a small home. They may wish not to have Frank Crozier among them, but they find that I _am_ among them, vengeful in this respect too, and then I am not alone. And then they must make room for me, just as if I had a right to be here.”

“This is a strange attitude,” said James, with as much weight of fondness in his voice as it could bear, “in a captain. But you are a strange sort of captain.”

“And you appear a much more normal sort of captain, and yet I know you are similarly –”

“Cuckoo?” 

“You are terrible, James.”

All this time, they had been moving closer to one another, until at last they felt the press of each other’s bodies, and their combined hands were in James’ lap. He could smell James’ rankness, his decay – his mouth smelled cleanly of blood – but he felt nothing about it. it was just as if James had been freshly bathed in some fine London house, after a spell of rigorous and voluntary exercise of whatever sort he preferred (Indian clubs, surely?), and stripped of every human scent. It was all the same.

James kissed him. The kiss was a darkness that gave his eyes rest, an emptiness that unmanned him and quietly relieved him of command. It seemed a natural extension of the holding of his hand. Their hands framed each other’s faces, and he felt a response in his body, a heat. Some motion of his gave it away, and he felt James’ hand on the front of his trousers and then inside, between the buttons. A few hot thrusts and the signal faded, but he felt warm and leaned his head on James’ shoulder.

“Hm,” said James. 

“James, dear.” His eyes had grown swollen and wet. That word, James Ross’ word, had come to his tongue once again. He wanted to find a new word for the man before him, but there were no more words for him now, none that he had not already said. He felt that every English word he said from now on would vanish, and not be used again. When had it been, the day when the words had come to their peak and begun to decline? Not Sir John’s funeral or the night of the carnival. No, it had been today, this very hour.

The two of them huddled close together, Francis’ head on James’ shoulder. Outside, a little gray light was trickling into the world, and their pale, exhausted faces were graying too. There seemed no way to make it worse and no way to make it right, and most of all, no way to leave. And yet they must leave; they must attend to the grim duties of the day. Finally James heaved a great sigh and said, “I’m envious. I’ve been soft as a – as a worm since we abandoned the ships.”

“A worm, James?”

James turned his ruined face full on him. “What do you want of me?”

“Nothing. I only expected a more nautical turn of phrase."

“Shall I be slack as a man-rope?”

Francis rubbed James’ hand. “I envy _you_ , at any rate, if it was so recently. I have been drunk and fifty for entirely too many years.”

“Well,” said James. “You must live, or you will be fifty forever. Think of that.”

Francis got up, stretched out his back. “James, do you want to rest a little longer? No one will fault you for it.”

“No. No, I can.”

“You needn’t.”

“I want to. Or I’ll be consumed by it, thinking about it. Help me up, Francis.”

He extended a hand, helped James to haul himself to his feet – feeling the full height of his body, the effort it took him to rise. James clung to him for a moment for support, and then a little longer, and then they walked out of the tent together.

**Author's Note:**

> I set out to write a straight-up Fitzier story, but ended up writing 2,700 words of dialogue heavily influenced by my time as a suicide hotline operator. We can't shake who we are, I guess!
> 
> This also came out of the Indelicates' devastating duet "Not Alone" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6NWGkRvMck), a deeply autobiographical song that I apologize for incorporating into my mental Terror mythos, except that I also don't. "And I have no ladder/and I have no rope/I can't see where the sun is rising/and I can offer no hope/but --"


End file.
